IWA For Sunday 030208

Oops

Hey folks,

It’s Sunday Time for the IWA. This weeks winner is a classic example of an Oops. Picture this, you are just sitting there doing your job, when all of a sudden, you effect MILLIONS of people all across an entire state. You put drivers in danger, kids on school buses. Fire and Police stations are interrupted briefly, Hospitals, Schools, businesses. Millions of homes go black. Get this.

BLACKOUT RECAP

6. • 26 transmission lines and 38 of FPL's approximately 600 substations were
affected, leaving
1 million people
without power.
• Two nuclear
reactors and a
natural gas unit at the Turkey Point
facility south of
Miami shut down protectively

What can you say? Oops is pretty much it.

Most of you probably do not know, but there was a major power outage all across the State of Florida. Everyone went to high alert, and all kinds of thoughts were going through people’s minds. So what happened? According to the local paper here, The FPL: Employee error was behind massive blackout

MIAMI — A power outage that affected large parts of Florida this week was primarily the result of human error, the state's largest electric company said Friday.

Florida Power & Light released a two-page preliminary report on the incident that says a field engineer was to blame for Tuesday's outage. Officials said the engineer was investigating a malfunctioning switch at one of the power company's substations in west Miami when he disabled two levels of protection for the system.

While he was making measurements of the switch, a short circuit occurred, and the problem cascaded to other parts of the system.

“We don't know, still, why that particular employee took it upon himself to disable both sets of relays,” FPL President Armando Olivera said during a 45-minute conference call with reporters.

The employee, who had “significant tenure with the company,” has been put on paid leave while the incident continues to be investigated, Olivera said.

Of course they did not release his name yet, but you know who you are. Congratulations to you, the FPL worker that shut down Florida, you ARE the Idiot of the Week. Maybe start practicing sounding sincere when saying “Sorry.” Just a suggestion.
Peter